The Cognitive Context Construction of Anaphora in Conversational Communication

Anaphora often occurs in conversational communication. For the hearer, the cognitive context construction of anaphora plays a very important role in understanding the speaker’s communicative purposes and promoting the progress of conversation. The present paper analyzes anaphora in conversation communication from the perspective of relevance theory and attempts to explore the construction of cognitive context in anaphora. This paper shows that ambiguity and conversational conflict often exists in daily communication due to the misunderstanding of the meaning of referent words caused by unclear anaphora. There are two main reasons: (1) The context constructed by the hearer about anaphora is different from the context constructed by the speaker about antecedent; and (2) For the hearer, the context constructed by the speaker about the antecedent and anaphora is not clear.

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